Finished model 2022-II

Another horrid paper model: The Royal ship Vasa. Box scale, or rather, post card scale. The double-curved surfaces were impossible for me to bend correctly, I wonder if there is some magic trick to make the card stock more pliable. By the stern there were several very thin wedges the were to be cut and glued to make the curved shape. Only afterwards did I realise I should have just cut away the tiny triangles intended as glueing surfaces and instead glued a wider piece of card onto the back. One may note that the bowsprit, which carried a quite sizeable sail, is not represented in the kit. I could perhaps have used a cocktail stick to add it, but couldn’t be bothered.

Finished model 2022-I

As mentioned long ago Pilot 13/1977 contains 3-plan drawings of the Cavalier Turbo Mustang III, and suggestions for how to build one, based on a P-51D Mustang kit. I thought this was a cool-looking aircraft that should be built at some point. Later, I decided I would build it in 1:160 scale for a train modeller friend of mine. When I found a 10 mm scale Minifigs white metal model of a P-51C Mustang, I thought maybe I could use it as the base for a conversion and started collecting references. A fellow modeller, whose name has been unfairly and unfortunately lost in time, mailed me his entire collection of magazine clippings on the Turbo Mustang III. I designed decals in 1:160 scale and had them printed by Al Superczynski. Then I spent several years angsting over how to do surgery on the metal model. I had studied the Heritage Aviation Models conversion kit and had some ideas, but it seemed a daunting prospect anyway, so in the end nothing happened, until I recently noticed that the Shapeways Marketplace contains a number of aircraft models of varying quality and wwitalik has a Turbo Mustang III model which is printable in 1:160. (The model claims to work as a Piper PA-48 Enforcer as well, which isn’t true—there are numerous differences between the two types, not the least being that the Enforcer’s engine exhaust is on the left side of the fuselage.)

I ordered the model printed in “White Natural Versatile Plastic” and it soon arrived. In order to be printable, several features of the model was grossly over-scale and I did my best to adjust these. The propeller blades and tailwheel were cut off, as they were mostly just plastic lumps. The main landing gear is also overly thick, but I felt uncertain about replacing that with anything sensible, but maybe I should have tried. The trailing edges of wings, stabilizer and fin had to be sanded down, which turned out to be difficult—the plastic is rather elastic and tended to just follow the sanding stick and then left grainy fibres along the edge. In the end I had to call it a day and consider the edges as thinned as I was likely to succeed with. In contrast, drilling out the exhaust was actually quite easy. Another things I left off was milling out the landing gear wells, as I wasn’t convinced I would be able to do it well—I would need some kind of way of carefully steering the cutter. Likewise, I briefly considered heatsmashing a transparent cockpit canopy, but apart from the technical difficulties of that, that would also have required milling out the cockpit without accidentally going through the sidewalls. There is a not-particularly expensive milling attachment for my Dremel, maybe I should invest in that.

I fashioned thin propeller blades out of Contrail profiles, cutting and carefully twisting them in warm (not too hot!) water to get blade shapes, landing gear covers were fashioned out of Plastruct sheet, tail wheel covers out of a slice of some aluminium can I had lying around, and a new tail wheel was made from a bit of Plastruct rod and piano wire. I primed the kit with Mr Surfacer 1200 and eventually started painting it. The Turbo Mustang III was intended as a COIN aircraft and at the time it would have meant deployment in Vietnam, so was painted in the then-current South-East Asia camouflage. This meant Humbrol 28, 116, 117, 118. I tried Maskol, again, to mask the colour fields and it seemed to work better now, but the Tamiya masking tape I used to mask off the bottom colour managed to lift a bit of the paint, and even some primer. With the uneven surface that the Mr Surfacer hadn’t managed to improve, airbrushing didn’t make much of a difference, and since I had to touch up scuffed paint at several points, I finally gave up and just brush painted the lot. The control surface hinge lines were accentuated with a pencil. (I need to get me a 0.3 mm pencil again, it has its uses.)

The result will not win any prices (I tried), but it felt good to finally get the old project out of my system, even if in a somewhat different form than originally envisioned.

Trust issues

Reading student reports I often get side-tracked into closer looks at their sources. Not conducive for quick grading, but one can find lots of interesting things. In this case a student pair had looked at drug abuse statistics at the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics and, being source-critical, noted that the claim “The front page of DrugAbuseStatistics.org features the most noteworthy data regarding drug abuse” didn’t have any supporting source itself. I had to agree that this was the case. Furthermore, once I started browsing the website I realised there was absolutely no information about who NCDAS are. No address, no “About Us” box, no nothing. It seems unlikely that this would be some government organ.

Next step was to google their name to see if anyone else commented on their affiliation, but here, too, absolutely nothing. However, lots of hits on other sites that refer to the statistics collected by them. And I wondered: Is the official-sounding name enough for everybody and their grandmother to assume that this is the best data available, citing them, thus making sure they get to the top of the google searches for drug statistics? They do give sources for their statistics, but even I haven’t made the effort to double-check that the statistics are correctly quoted from the given sources, whose quality in turn is unclear.

To be sure, they might be perfectly legit, but how do we know that?

I write like lots of people

I Write Like uses statistical analysis to compare your writing style with that of well-known English-language authors. I tried different entries from this blog and each of them was apparently reminiscent of a completely different author. Maybe a longer text would give more dependable results? I tried feeding in my PhD thesis. It was most similar to Agatha Christie. I hadn’t earlier noticed the extensive note apparatus of Murder on the Links. Actually, I didn’t notice it now either. For comparison, I also fed in my licentiate thesis, by an even younger me, presumably less mature. That was most similar to the writings of Gertrude Stein. A matrix row is a row is a row is a row?

But, Siggy explains why the algorithm is so often wrong.

Related products

As I’ve noted before, the Amazon recommendation engine frequently suggests rather surprising related purchases. Today I got this trio of books suggested:

The book that triggered these? The Buckley-class Destroyer Escorts. Possibly reading naval literature is a sign of decreasing mental faculties which may cause your partner to leave you, in which case you are reduced to public speaking as a source of income. Or something.

Anti-submarine warfare

Completely coincidentally, in these days of submarine anniversaries, I found the site Indicator Loops on Allied harbour protections against submarines. Apparently there was one of these just next to the grounding site at the time, one wonders if they are still around or if they have been dismantled.

Is this the little girl I carried?

The Only-Begotten Daughter and the Love of Her Life didn’t let go of each other’s hands and eyes from the moment the walked up the church aisle to their exit in a cloud of rose petals and soap bubbles. Their loving looks could have lit up the hall all by themselves. The couple had clearly spent the last year planning every smallest detail of the wedding, achieving the effortless smoothness of practice. The solo performance by one of their friends of “For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her” was the idea of my daughter, I am convinced.

A bus was waiting outside to take all wedding guests to the manor in the city where the wedding dinner would be served. I realised Långholmen indeed is quite a long island. The wedding cake was eaten and then we were sent out on a quiz-walk in the brisk autumn afternoon while the dinner was laid out. Merrily picking choices we found that details of academic titles can be quite complicated (as if I didn’t know).

The dinner was served in a very church-like room, which however was the billiards and music hall of a previous owner. Each seat had been supplied with a leaflet giving brief but spot-on descriptions of all guests, so that everybody immediately could start conversations with unfamiliar faces. The catering staff had apparently memorised each person’s dietary requirements as they efficiently served the courses through the evening. We parents of the brides made our speeches during the entrée. I believe I managed reasonably well, but the heart-felt and witty speeches of their friends brought what tears had not yet been shed. That they both had retained so many of their childhood friends tells something of their loyalty and indeed at one point the OBD interrupted the proceedings to honour the birthday of one of these friends. The dinner ended with everybody lustily joining in in “Chiquitita”.

Another interlude during which the tables were cleared to open the dancefloor. The bridal waltz turned out to be “Graceland”, which I hadn’t realised was so danceable. My mother jitterbugged as if age didn’t matter, but eventually we took her home and went to sleep, letting the young folks dance on. The baton has now been passed to the next generation.

Ship spotters

Reading up on aircraft carriers, I ran into scores of codes indicating the convoys the carriers were protecting. I could distinguish certain patterns, but the full information is of course available at ConvoyWeb

The waterfall method

I have been to Hepoköngäs, which is one of the more easily accessible waterfalls in Finland.

Advertising

Some advertising burns itself into my brain, while I remain totally ignorant of who is trying to sell what. One example is these two hilariously clueless gentlemen, whom I probably resemble more than I want to recognise.

Heritage

Today the OBS absolved the public defence of his PhD thesis. My grandfather went to school because they served lunch, saving his mother a meal. My parents received secondary education. The OBS has been in education since preschool.

One of the professors in the grading committee I knew from when we were sprightly Young Scientists, with hair, in the 1980s. Already then we had set out on our respective research tracks. We’ll hang along for a little while, but the next generation is waiting to take over. And that is as it should be.

À propos UFOs

While an eminent and hardworking singer, Alice Babs never struck me as particularly bright. I believe it was when she was interviewed in Gäst hos Hagge that she showed a clip of her singing on Masada. She went on about how they had managed to capture the “presence of beings” on the film and how excited the camera man had been about this. This was of course quite interesting, so I watched very intently, but saw absolutely nothing extraordinary. Alice Babs beamed proudly and the interviewer, possibly as nonplussed as I, just moved right along. I hesistantly had to conclude that the honoured royal court singer must have been unfamiliar with lens flares. It seems many other people are too.

Norm critical

It will soon be ten years that Honeybuns and I have lived in this flat but it was only this morning, as the batteries in my electric razor suggested they might run out soon, that I realised that we have two bathrooms, one that contains the washing machine and tumbler, and one that has a plug for an electric razor. (Which arguably in itself might be slightly antiquated, as most razors run on batteries these days, or so I believe.)

Do I make sense?

I’d had a video automatically transcribed. I presume all kinds of AI jiggery-pokery had gone into turning audio frequencies into text—it was clear that the transcription engine was aware that a lot of hemming and hawing could be deleted, on the other hand not-quite-silences could be extrapolated into what probably was being said. A few times this worked amazingly well, but all too often the resulting text was nonsense. I was going to blame this on the lack of deep understanding on the part of the transcription engine, but as I replayed and replayed the same five second clip, trying to hear what was being said, by myself, I came to wonder: Is this actually what my students hear when I lecture—words that may be grammatically correctly connected, but rarely make any sense?

Women and attack helicopters

There has been a bit of a kerfuffle about the short story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter”. I don’t have the skin in the game to judge if the story is hurtful to trans people, but for a number of reasons I was intrigued enough to read the story and found it, at least from a literary perspective, to be quite good. The author is, I understand, suggested to be using a pseudonym. Quite possible; the quality of the writing suggests at least some prior experience with writing (science) fiction. In this case, perhaps twenty years ago this would have been characterised as a story of cyborgs, while today such close coupling between humans and machinery is taken for granted. The way this melding is described I associate with authors such as Charles Stross or Peter Watts (and yes, I realise those are male authors). I struggle to identify precisely what it is in the writing style that ties them together; perhaps something about wars fought remotely, but where the machines at the front have their own ideas about it.

Murray Leinster’s “The Wabbler” can be seen as an early predecessor, but reads, at least now, as more detached. It may have had a stronger impact in the 1940s when semi-autonomous fighting machines were just emerging.

But, to return to the original subject: when the modelling club used to participate at the Hobby Fair in Stockholm, we offered plastic models at cost for families to sit and build together at our table. An observation we made at the time was that the mothers tended to choose attack helicopter models. Perhaps it is indeed true that they have a very feminine combat style.

Finished model 2019-III

I find paper models to be scarily difficult to build – the paper is hard to shape and utterly unforgiving of the slightest mistakes. Still, I got challenged to put together a postcard model of Drottningholm palace. Which I did. The results, as I had feared, were mostly horrible, but as soon as it was done, I got supplied with a postcard model of the Liebfrauenkirche in Munich, so I guess I have to start on it. An idea of mine is that I will use my photo-etch bending tool to bend the paper into sharp corners. We shall see how that goes.

Who cares about categories anyway?

I’ve often wondered about the way books in the Amazon web shop get categorised, and this latest set of recommended reading suggests they have a very liberal attitude to contents.

Language complications

Master’s students are presenting their theses, faculty members comment on their work. My German colleague’s accent becomes even more accentuated in English, and still more by him being quite critical:
“I take ekzeption to your very first vord. Vaht do you mean by ‘vee’?”

Having dissected the permissible uses of authorial pronouns, he continues:
“I zink your use of RE iz inappropriate.”

The student, already rattled, becomes even more confused:
“Did I write RE? It should be ER.”

The opponent relentlessly pursues the RE issue, while the student desperately scans through the paper, vainly trying to find the offending statement. I finally make the connection, and interrupt the proceedings:
“I think what we’re discussing, is AI.”

Veckans ord: härröra

En anledning till den framgångsrika tyska invasionen av Frankrike var att de brittiska och franska arméerna var okoordinerade, det var rent ut sagt en fullkomlig härröra.

Finished models 2019-I and II

Well, compare with my earlier dryads. This did get a honorable mention for skillfully executed atmosphere at Warszawski Festiwal Modelarski 2019, but I’m not convinced it’s all that. However, the wash lent by a friend definitely brought out the surface texture much better this time, but the Vallejo paints insist on flaking as soon as you look at the figure, no matter how carefully it has been primed. I shall try using surgical gloves when handling the figures and see if that makes a difference.

The Orc Druid, well, you can see the difficulty I’ve had with the colour demarcations; that is definitely something that I have to improve. Possibly I need to dilute the paint more, but also feather the areas more.

Both figures old Games Workshop items.